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Lt_Zogg
Reviews
Hamlet (2000)
A contemporary intergenerational adaptation
The hard questions have already been answered by other reviewers. Here's the answer key to the easy ones. The yuppie villains are played by boomers. The good guys are played by gen-xers who act like emo/goth gen-y cardboard cutouts. The ghost, the blameless one, is a war baby. And, yes, laptop computers still took 3 1/2 inch floppies in 2000. Everybody except the ghost mumbles their lines as if they can't quite believe they're doing Shakespeare. I missed Hamlet's flute lesson at the start of the play within a play, because it was a video, not live performance. And, yes, gunplay is more in keeping with modern times, but pre-empting the switcheroo-swordplay of the climax was a grave disservice to groundlings such as myself.
Gilmore Girls (2000)
My favorite stooge was Larry
This partially explains my rating. If these people would simply cut with the clever repartee and listen to each other for a couple minutes , they might start learning how to stop sabotaging their relationships. Or choosing bad ones.
Granted, I'm still sweeping through season three. In season one I was enchanted, by Lorelai's loopy spontaneity and backstory and Rory's precociousness old soul sensibility. It's like the mother-daughter roles were reversed. Oh, yeah, and by the dialogue you can tell that they are smart. And by their choices, more than a little bit stubborn. Fine, nobodies perfect.
So now we're toward the end of the third season and Lorelai still hasn't let up on her mother. She won't let go of Rick, Lorelai's father, whose wife just gave birth, and she acts possessive of Luke despite pushing him away every time tries to get close. Meanwhile, Rory has grown into a typical fickle private high school senior, who just happens to have been accepted to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and is inexplicably in love with Luke's nephew, whose interactions with the whole town, including Rory, suggest he's a sociopath.
So imagine yourself at a party where the minute one person stops talking, another one pipes in with a witty comeback. Relentlessly. Imagine yourself in a family where no one learns from their mistakes. Imagine yourself in a town where the citizens are no more than background or plot contrivances to your own personal narrative. I'll probably stick around to see what happens, but I'm no longer expecting to connect with anyone.
Gilmore Girls: Teach Me Tonight (2002)
Two families, a town, in need of adults
Episodes 19-21 were excruciating for me to watch. Jess's problems at school are obviously too difficult to be solved by peer-tutoring, but Luke insists on asking Rory, Lorelai objects but she misses the mark, and Rory, an innocent who tries to see good in everyone, seems truly fascinated by Jess, and hasn't learned all the applications for saying No, agrees to take him on. So he fobs off on doing any work until they break for ice cream, she lets him drive her car, and he smashes it. No doubt this is going to hurt Dean, who put a lot of himself into fixing up that car and giving it to Rory. Train wreck ahead!
The town and Lorelai fawn over Rory's ordeal and injury, Rory declares her independence by insisting the fault was hers, not Jess's, Jess disappears, and Dean just seems to fade out of the picture, hurt, angry, solicitous, and maybe stoic.
Clearly, Jess has done nothing to to dispell the impression that he's a sociopath. His interest in other people is limited to being entertained when he manipulates them into screwing up their best intentions. Lorelai knows Jess is trouble but can't find the right warnings, Rory, who can usually be counted on for her intelligence and mature judgement, is oblivious to the glaring warning signs, and Dean, who is admittedly clingy but sincerely devoted, never has a chance to begin expressing the conflicting feelings he must have. I guess that's what being a teenager is all about, but where are the adults? I guess I'll have to watch Season 3 to find out.
Falling Down (1993)
A man devoid of executive functioning
Psychologists define executive functioning as the act of regulating one's actions so as to facilitate one's intentions. The theory of executive functioning may have existed in 1993 when this film was made, but it would be another decade or two before the public would become aware of it.
Michael Douglas plays a man who is having a bad day. Just like Odysseus, he only wants to go home, but the forces of the universe seem to be against him. So he reacts. Unlike Odysseus, he "goes on autopilot." One reaction leads to the next, until he becomes a public nuisance, leading to the inevitable result.
Odysseus was an imperfect man, but he knew what he wanted. That's why he had his men tie him to the mast of his ship as they passed the Sirens. That's why he's a hero. Douglas' William Foster just falls down.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)
War for the photo-ops
The reviews that accurately bring up the cheesy tone of this film prompted me to write this.
Of course it's cheesy. Operation Iraqi Freedom was entered into on false pretexts and used as a test for the patriotism of skeptics, in Congress and among the electorate. The fighting on the ground was real, as it is in all wars, but the impressions gathered and created by "embedded" journalists, sent home via satellite, and viewed on cable news and the internet, were designed to manipulate. Here is our new professionalized all-volunteer armed services, heroically whupping Iraqi terrorist ass, to protect our way of life in the good old USA.
It goes without saying that servicemen and women work hard and serve heroically. We've seen those images in the actual combat footage and thoughtful films like Flags of Our Fathers and The Best Years of Our Lives. But for those of us at home, the politicians, the politically connected business people, the book publishers, the media executives, the professional sports tycoons, the advertisers, and the enthusiasts and skeptics alike on the sidelines, Iraqi Freedom was a media event. It was a spectacle and a medium onto which we projected our own enterprises, prejudices, world views, and interests.
And that is what this film represents. War is only real for the men and women who fight it.
Montenegro (1981)
The most outrageous of the psychotic housewife genre
Susan Anspach is beautiful and delirious (must've been the acting lessons from Jack Nicholson), Marianne Faithfull singing "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was a stroke of brilliance, and the scene of the husband prancing around the Danish moderne bedroom with his psychiatrist and his wife, wearing nothing but matching bathrobes juxtaposed to the gypsy basting the roast with the beer he's drinking is one of the most memorable scenes.
I'd own this but there are children in the house. It is raunchy.
Slap Shot (1977)
If you want to know what the 70s was about ...
... this movie tells it like it was. Or, if you were there, living in any small northeastern or mid-Atlantic city, it brings it all back.
It's a compelling social history set in the backdrop of minor-league professional hockey.
Nashville (1975)
Weren't the 70s a time?
In the 70s, before "Star Wars," there was a sort of renaissance going on in Hollywood. Vietnam was over, we could finally put some of that stridency aside (regardless of which side you were on), and we could start enjoying some of the more subtle aspects of life.
Robert Altman was the experimentalist of the bunch. I saw this flick after a summer of feverishly reading William Faulkner and seeing "Brewster McCloud", so I was primed and ready for it.
If you don't mind movies that don't have traditional plots and protagonists, movies that find epiphanies where you're not supposed to be looking, they you're probably going to find something of value here. On the other hand, if this sort of thing bothers you, or if you're a serious adherent to the Nashville music factory's party line, you're probably going to hate this movie. If you can't love your tacky relatives in spite of the way they irritate you, you're probably going to hate this movie.
Now I love experimentalism almost as much as I love country music, so this is like heaven for me. There is a lot of disparagement because these characters act so self-centered, like with the knowing gazes from the women Tom Frank has boinked, as he sings "I'm Easy." But we know that these are good people.
Linnea (Lily Tomlin) is dedicated to her children and her church. Barbara Jean is an artist whose dedication to the music and her fans is driving her
to psychotic exhaustion. Even the pompous Haven Hamilton has his moment of heroism when he shields Barbara Jean after she's been shot, with a bullet in his own shoulder. Later, he steps to the microphone to reassure the crowd, but he knows he needs help, so he cries out for it -- "Somebody sing something!"
Some people need their heroes to be one-dimensional, as if they never had a single longing for a personal gratification like a lover who cares, a voice that wants expression, a little comfort or some recognition and admiration. I don't know where these kinds of saints live, but if they are somewhere, I sure don't want to see them because they're going to make me feel like real heel.
Now I'd like to say something about what is known in lit circles as "the Faulkner woman," Barbara Harris' portrayal of Albuquerque. Tattered and apparently clueless, she's a woman on a mission, guided by a vision that the rest of us can only see as delusional. When that microphone ends up in her hand and she sings, we finally understand who she is and how much we underestimated her.
Our joy in finding the power of her voice is what this movie wants to reveal to us, but only after guiding us through the vanity and sorrow of everyday life.